Project MUSE®: Neotestamentica - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/707
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Neotestamentica.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 49 (2015) through current issueLatest Articles: NeotestamenticaTWOProject MUSE®Neotestamentica2518-46280254-8356Latest articles in Neotestamentica. Feed provided by Project MUSE®A Special Edition for Early Christian Studies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978162
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The publishing of a Special Edition is a noteworthy event. It does not happen frequently (see Botha, Craffert & Vorster 1994; Dijkhuizen 2016)1 and when it does, it is a milestone, a proud moment, a reason for celebration, but most of all an opportunity to acknowledge a noteworthy development.Neotestamentica is the journal of the New Testament Society of Southern Africa, which was started in 1967.2 The scholars who were the driving force in the development of the NTSSA were well versed academics, often experts in a variety of fields, including philology, textual criticism, comparative literature, and the study of ancient cultures contemporaneous with the biblical traditions. One is happy to notice these skills and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/707/image/coversmallA Special Edition for Early Christian Studies2025-12-24text/htmlen-USA Special Edition for Early Christian Studies2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®347732026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24The "Formation" of Jesus in the Long Second Century: A Proposal for an Agenda
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978163
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This essay was read as a paper at the 2024 annual meeting of the New Testament Society of Southern Africa in Wellington in a session of the Early Christian Studies subgroup. It is offered here as an introduction to the special theme issue of Neotestamentica which offers a collection of a number of contributions from members of the subgroup which have been selected from papers read over the past three years. This essay does not pretend to be anything more than an explorative experiment testing the boundaries of future directions of theorisation, research, and conversation—in other words, it is a roadmap. It is not intended to be a comprehensive statement on the state of discourse on the formation of Christianity in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/707/image/coversmallThe "Formation" of Jesus in the Long Second Century: A Proposal for an Agenda2025-12-24text/htmlen-USThe "Formation" of Jesus in the Long Second Century: A Proposal for an Agenda2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®3010662026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Reconstructing the Second Century in the Fourth: The Curious Case of Eusebius of Caesarea's Ecclesiastical History
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978164
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The 2025 NTSSA conference theme, "The Long Second Century and the Renegotiation of a Scriptural Universe," aptly captures a fundamental shift in early Christian studies: the recognition that Christianity did not emerge fully formed but was instead the product of prolonged and contested processes of self-definition.1 Far from being a period of passive transmission, the second and third centuries constituted what Judith Lieu (2018, 294–308) has called an "age of the laboratory"—a time of experimentation, debate, and creative reinvention in which various Jesusmovements and Christ-cult groups negotiated their identities within the complex religious landscape of the Mediterranean world. This era was marked by an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/707/image/coversmallReconstructing the Second Century in the Fourth: The Curious Case of Eusebius of Caesarea's Ecclesiastical History2025-12-24text/htmlen-USReconstructing the Second Century in the Fourth: The Curious Case of Eusebius of Caesarea's Ecclesiastical History2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®1478182026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Lines and Nets: Tracing Patterns in Early Christianity
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978165
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All history writing makes choices out of the chaos of available information; how to select; how to see patterns. What models do we use to select relevant information and to create a narrative out of it? In recent years the variety of different models and of different patterns has grown. A constant fundamental question remains though: how do the patterns that we identify relate to the shifting points and lines on the ground visible to anyone in the past? The patterns that we see more than likely were not how the people we study experienced their lives and choices. Too often as scholars and students we mistake the patterns that we see, the models that we adopt, as directly re-presenting the "real thing" when in truth
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/707/image/coversmallLines and Nets: Tracing Patterns in Early Christianity2025-12-24text/htmlen-USLines and Nets: Tracing Patterns in Early Christianity2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®653402026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24The Epistle of Barnabas: Exhortation to follow the Way of the Light
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978166
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In this article we will focus on Barnabas' aim of promoting the "Way of Life". The purpose is not to pursue the issue of the literary sources of the Letter,3 or of the Letter's relationship to Paul.4 The focus will be on "the world of the text";5 we will not venture in "the world behind the text" in terms of clarifying the precise relationships between the community of Barnabas and the surrounding Jewish communities.6In chapters 1–17 Barnabas posits a radical contrast between two groups: his own and the traditional Israelite one.7 The first group, "us", is said to be on the Way of Light, while the second one is labelled as on the Way of Darkness. Therefore, his addressees should keep away from "them". While the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/707/image/coversmallThe Epistle of Barnabas: Exhortation to follow the Way of the Light2025-12-24text/htmlen-USThe Epistle of Barnabas: Exhortation to follow the Way of the Light2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®881392026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Is the Barnabas Document a Proponent of a Trinitarian or Hierarchical (Subordinate) Divine Concept?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978167
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As a resident of Alexandria1 during the second century CE,2 the author of the Barnabas document had to give thought to how and to what extent Jesus relates to the Judeo-Christian deity.3 To add to these appropriated thoughts, he also had to account for how the Pneuma relates to these two entities, namely Jesus and the Judean-Christian deity. This is not to suggest that the author intended to compose a "trinitarian" theological treatise, but that the author had no choice but to leave remnants of the cognitive processes as he drafts the document. This investigation is interested in these remnants: to be sure, how the author constructed and thought about how these entities, that is, Jesus, the Judean-Christian deity
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/707/image/coversmallIs the Barnabas Document a Proponent of a Trinitarian or Hierarchical (Subordinate) Divine Concept?2025-12-24text/htmlen-USIs the Barnabas Document a Proponent of a Trinitarian or Hierarchical (Subordinate) Divine Concept?2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®875762026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Dynamics of Christian Identity: Negation, Delegitimisation and the Epistle of Barnabas
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978168
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Barnabas's1 use of negative and stereotyping language has drawn considerable comment. So has similar language in the New Testament. A landmark contribution in New Testament scholarship is that of Johnson who shows that vilification was very much an integral part of the rhetorical practices of the Hellenistic world, emphasising that the art of verbal mud-wrestling was par for public discourse at the time. There was an entire genre of discourse, the invective (ψόγος), that is no less startling for being remarkably formulaic (Johnson 1989). Educated orators memorized displays of verbal combat and would readily adopt them whenever they wanted to discredit their opponents. So, when Apion
charged that the Jews were
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/707/image/coversmallDynamics of Christian Identity: Negation, Delegitimisation and the Epistle of Barnabas2025-12-24text/htmlen-USDynamics of Christian Identity: Negation, Delegitimisation and the Epistle of Barnabas2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®1404242026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Montanism: A Local, Popular, Apocalyptic Reform Movement in Early Christianity
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978169
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This paper will focus on Montanism in its early decades. More precisely, the aim is to situate three of the much-disputed aspects of the movement within the wider context of Early Christianity, namely, prophecy, eschatology, and their novel, more rigorous, moral rules. A major problem in the study of Montanism is that practically all our literary information about the movement comes to us as extracts from anti-Montanist documents and is biased.2Montanism originated with Montanus and the two prophetesses, Maximilla and Priscilla, in Phrygia sometime between 135 and 175, most probably 165 C.E. (Tabbernee 2007:xxix). This paper aims to show that it is a particular form of Christianity of a more popular nature, which
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/707/image/coversmallMontanism: A Local, Popular, Apocalyptic Reform Movement in Early Christianity2025-12-24text/htmlen-USMontanism: A Local, Popular, Apocalyptic Reform Movement in Early Christianity2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®787082026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Musicalising the Montanist New Prophetic Spirit of Prophecy: A Dramatic-Theological Musicalised Analogy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978170
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It is commonplace for twenty-first century people to refer to the movement associated with Montanus as Montanism, but that is not what it used to be called by its own adherents or even by the Montanus-opposition: the late-second century movement self-identified as the New Prophecy, while its opponents used various names such as the sect of those named after the Phrygians (specifically Montanus, Priscilla and Maximilla), or the heresy of the Phrygians, and so forth (Tabbernee 2007, xxx). One of the major problems for the contemporary researcher, is that the voices of Montanus, Priscilla and Maximilla were silenced so effectively that one has to depend on brief citations and fragments of thoughts, often quoted with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/707/image/coversmallMusicalising the Montanist New Prophetic Spirit of Prophecy: A Dramatic-Theological Musicalised Analogy2025-12-24text/htmlen-USMusicalising the Montanist New Prophetic Spirit of Prophecy: A Dramatic-Theological Musicalised Analogy2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®597292026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24Faith or Fate: Virgin Sacrifice in Greek Tragedies and in the New Testmant
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/978171
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Sacrifices can be differentiated between physical sacrifice in a religious context and a mental sacrifice in a personal context. Sacrifices in a religious context usually involved the sacrifice of an animal; however, there are instances found in which human sacrifices were practiced. Virgin sacrifices appear as a topos in several plays written by the Athenian playwright, Euripides. Three Euripidian tragedies were chosen where virgin sacrifice appears in a religious context. The tragedies are Iphigeneia in Aulis, Hecuba, and The Children of Herakles. A link is found in the New Testament in the story of Mary and Elizabeth.Sacrifices were a well-known occurrence in the ancient world and were known as a method to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/707/image/coversmallFaith or Fate: Virgin Sacrifice in Greek Tragedies and in the New Testmant2025-12-24text/htmlen-USFaith or Fate: Virgin Sacrifice in Greek Tragedies and in the New Testmant2025-12-242025TWOProject MUSE®847452026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002025-12-24